Thomas Breen photo
Yale has purchased a vacant former rubber factory in the Hill that was once home to vibrant, illegal live-work artist studios for more than $2.5 million.
According to a warranty deed posted to the city’s land records database last Thursday, Yale University bought the complex at 69 – 75 Daggett St. from 69 – 75 Daggett Street LLC for $2,575,000.
The three-building complex off of Congress Avenue was last sold for $1.4 million in 2004. The city most recently appraised it for tax purposes as worth $1,384,000.
The property’s seller is a holding company controlled by Honey Damaghi of Great Neck, N.Y.
Yale Associate Vice President for New Haven Affairs and University Properties Alexandra Daum said the university has no specific planned use yet for the property and “no current plans to take the property off the tax rolls.”
“To the extent any part of the property is deemed for academic use in the future,” she stated, “we will follow the terms of our partnership agreement with the city.”
The complex itself dates back to the late 19th century. It was the original home to the Seamless Rubber Company, which manufactured an array of rubber medical products, including surgical gloves, rubber tubing, hot water bottles, and bottle nipples. Seamless moved into a new plant on Hallock Street in 1919, and the Daggett Street complex was occupied in subsequent years by Goodyear Rubber Sundries Inc.
In the 1970s, the complex was rented out to artists, who set up live-work studios there and turned Daggett Street Square into a linchpin of the city’s underground creative scene for decades to come. In 2015, city government shut down Daggett Street Square and evicted all of its artist tenants after finding a host of dangerous code violations — including a lack of proper smoke detectors, blocked fire exits and an inadequate sprinkler system — at a property that was never zoned for residential use.
“It was authentic, the real deal,” local painter and former Daggett tenant Katro Storm told Alexis Zanghi for this 2015 Independent article about Daggett’s closure.“Whenever you watch a movie about artists, it has everything that you could imagine that someone like Basquiat might have been painting, what kind of environment he might have been from, or Picasso. It just had that‘it’ factor. You knew you were somewhere special when you were in that building.”
Fake Babies file photo
Unit G-2, aka “The Submarine,” at the old Daggett.
The subsequent decade saw Daggett Square’s then owner try to convert the former factory buildings into 80 new apartments designed to attract medical students and nearby Yale hospital workers. Those apartments never came to be.
Damaghi could not be reached for comment for this article.
Yale’s purchase of the Daggett Square property marks the latest example of the university becoming a more active player in off-campus New Haven real estate.
Last August, Yale bought a two-and-a-half-story Prospect Street house-turned-office building for $2.85 million. In November, the university spent $7 million buying two more commercial properties on Broadway. In December, it bought the nine-story biomedical research building at 300 George St. for $139.6 million. And in February, the university sold the Chapel Street home of the Union League Cafe to a local tech philanthropist for $4.3 million.
This flurry of property dealings comes in the wake of a six-year agreement approved by the Board of Alders in April 2022. That deal states in part that, for any properties that Yale converts to a tax-exempt use, the university will pay the city over the subsequent 12 years a declining portion of the taxes that would otherwise be owed, as opposed to paying no property taxes at all right away.
According to the city’s tax bill website, this fiscal year’s local real estate tax bill for 69 – 75 Daggett is just over $36,000.